There are lots of ways to characterize the skills of a leader. Identifying your “in versus out ratio” is a really simple one that is pretty accurate.

If your organization feels like a revolving door for the best talent, then you should consider it a sign that you need to improve your leadership.

High end leaders seem to attract the best resources to work for them. They get a reputation based on treating people the right way, and developing them to be their best.

When people are fully engaged in the work, they have more fun and tend to tell others about their good fortune.

When there is a culture of high trust, people feel highly valued and tend to stick around.

Poor leaders tend to annoy people working for them. They may be erratic, pig headed, ruthless, dull, tyrants or countless other adjectives that make people want to get away from them, if they can.

The word spreads about these leaders as well, so the poor reputation becomes a telltale warning sign for would-be employees.

If you wish to know the caliber of your own leadership, simply make note of how easily you attract and retain the best talent. If people line up to join your team there must be a reason. Word has gotten out that working for you is rewarding and even enjoyable.

That is not to say there is no turnover in the organizations of great leaders. The best leaders care about the development of their people and seek to provide growth opportunities that sometimes mean leaving the fold.

My observation was that the best leaders tended to be generous with sharing resources, while poor leaders liked to hoard their talent and milk them all they could. That trend did not stop the best talent from getting fed up and seeking a way out.

Looking at the workers under a poor leader, you typically see a revolving door where people enter all excited and get out within a year or two after experiencing the frustrations that go with the daily behaviors that trash trust and enthusiasm.

To gauge the quality of your leadership, simply keep track of this ratio and compare it with others in your organization. If your ratio is healthy, that means you are probably doing things right.

Some churn in order to develop people is a good idea, but if people are anxious to get out of your organization, then you need to improve your leadership.

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations.

In our society, it is considered a bad thing to fail. From our earliest memory, we are all taught to succeed at what we try. It does not matter if it is taking a few steps on wobbly legs or negotiating an international merger of two huge organizations, we are conditioned that success is the goal and failure is anathema. Through this conditioning, we are taught to feel great when we have a success and to feel awful when we fail.

Take away the stigma of the word, and a failure is simply an attempt to do something that did not work out as planned. In the learning process, we obtain more information, momentum, resolve, inspiration, insight, and knowledge when we fail than when we succeed. To succeed is to get something done, but we have not learned very much. For example, without the corrective adjustments by ourselves and our parents, we would never learn to walk or talk. It is the constant reshaping of past tries that cause our forward progress.

I think it is time to embrace failure and to stop feeling bad about it. What we need in life is more at-bats rather than more home runs. Each time we go for something new, we risk failure, but not taking that risk is a bigger problem, because we block our own advancement.

The most often-quoted example of this theory is the story of Thomas Edison, who found that carbonized bamboo filaments worked well for his light bulb. His most famous quotation is, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 things that won’t work.” He also acknowledged that by being creative while simultaneously inventive, he was able to develop things that seemed like serendipity, but they were really the culmination of a lot of hard work and numerous failures. He once said, “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to doesn’t mean it’s useless.”

The key to embracing failure is to let go of the stigma and seek out the learning potential in every activity. They ought to teach a course on failing in grammar school. Kids should be introduced to the theory that to fail, as long as something was learned, is the route to eventual success. Instead, we hammer home the idea that to fail is to not live up to expectations. Children learn to fear rather than embrace failure. That attitude permeates our society, and it has a crippling effect on every organization.

Another aspect of failure is the idea that we never really fail until we quit trying. As long as we are stretching to achieve a goal, we have the potential for success. I love the quotation from Vince Lombardi who said, “We never lost a game, but sometimes we just ran out of quarters.”

I believe there needs to be good judgment when deciding how long to persevere. I do not think Winston Churchill was right when he said “Never, never, never, quit.” At some point, it is time to learn a lesson and leave the battlefield. It is okay to have a discarded scheme or to recognize a blind alley and cut your losses. It is important to recognize when we have run out of quarters, but it is wrong to quit trying prematurely. I think the difference between those two mindsets is the difference between genius and mediocrity.

I am not advocating that we fail on purpose. Doing things right should always be the objective. What I want to champion is that the only thing to avoid is making the same mistake over and over again. Some people focus on being busy just to have something to do. Thomas Edison had a quote for that too. He said, “Being busy does not always mean real work.”

Try having a “Experience Award” at work for daring to risk. Honor people who stretch and try but fail, as long as they learn from the experience. Doing this will seem unorthodox and “over the top” to many stuffy managers who will not tolerate things that are irregular. Too bad these managers are leaving real creativity off the table.